Keep Track of All Changes During a Website Redesign
In my opinion, most websites could stand a little redesign every two years or so. That is by no means a hard and fast rule, and if it isn’t broke don’t fix it, but usually some of the content needs to be updated, the layout can be tweaked and the site could use a fresh look. However, undergoing a major website redesign can completely destroy your past SEO efforts if you don’t keep an eye on several things during the process. Here is a list of some of the most important changes to keep track of during a website redesign: 1. 301 redirects Keeping track of any and all 301 redirects is probably one of the most important elements of a website redesign that a site owner CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How to Improve Your Web Site’s Visibility Using Structured Data Formats
This guest post is by Aleh Barysevich of Link-Assistant.Com Microformats, Microdata, RDFs and so-called Schemas are sets of standards used to mark up particular data in a body of HTML code. For example, one can highlight their company’s name, address, phone number, etc. on their web site using special tags. Such data is often referred to as structured, and has become widely used by webmasters with the development of the semantic Web. ‘What does it have to do with SEO?’ one may ask. Thing is, structuring information on your site makes it easier for the search engines to recognize it. As the result, your site may rank higher in Google and other search engines. At the same time, semantically marked-up data looks more appealing CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How to Prevent Your Website From Going Offline
There is nothing more heart stopping for a site owner than seeing that their website has been taken offline for some reason. Sometimes it’s not even your fault—your hosting company might be performing maintenance on their servers or is experiencing technical difficulties—but that doesn’t really make you feel any better about the situation. Every hour your website is offline the more damaging it is to your online business. Every wasted second means potential visitors can’t access your site even if they wanted to, which means your company has no way of making money online. Site’s that are down for an extended time might even find themselves facing serious SEO ramifications that can take a long time to overcome. Here are three ways you can help prevent CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
FuseMail Email Hosting Has Major Service Issues
On Sunday (April 1) I noticed that my email (hosted by FuseMail) box was rather empty. Now, for some business owners Sunday might be the only day of their week their inbox isn’t flooded with emails, but I usually get a decent amount (mostly newsletter subscriber updates), so to see no new emails was actually unusual for me. After logging into my FuseMail account, it didn’t take long for me to realize that not only was I not receiving emails, I couldn’t send them either! My FuseMail inbox was completely offline! Throughout the day on Sunday I called FuseMail 4-5 times only to get passed to voicemail each time. I went to bed frustrated, but hoped that they were just updating the server (wouldn’t be CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Differences Between a 301 and 302 Redirect
One of my biggest pet peeves as an SEO provider is being kept in the dark by a client. I’m not sure if they think I’ll be mad at them because they are redesigning their site or what (for the record, I think most sites could stand a redesign every few years) but on more than one occasion in my 12+ year career in the world of SEO and online marketing, I’ve had a client launch a new site without telling me about it. Why does that bother me? Because more often than not they forget to redirect all their old inbound links to the new site! Years of link building and site trust go down the drain in an instant. There is no way CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Is Focused On Site Speed
Google freely admits they use site speed as a ranking factor. That right there should be enough of a reason to make you care about the speed of your site. While site speed doesn’t carry as much weight as some of the other 200 odd signals Google takes into account when ranking your site, the fact that the search giant has bothered to let us mortal site owners know tells me it’s worth focusing on. Check out this video from Google about making the web faster: Even though the video is a few years old (and some of their predictions have already come true!), it still has some valuable information to think about. One point in particular sticks out to me: like CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Decrease Your Website Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate on your website could be stemming from a variety of different reasons. It could be that your design needs tweaking, content needs rewriting or simply people just don’t like your product but whatever it is there are ways to decrease the bounce rate on your site. Here are a few suggestions that you can implement that can significantly decrease the overall bounce rate of your website: Redesign: When was the last time you had your website redesigned? If it has been more than 5 years chances are you need to re-approach the design of your website and make it a bit friendlier. User Experience: If you didn’t own your website and you came across it how would you feel once you got there? CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Look At Your Google Webmaster Tools Account!
With the speed of the internet and the rate of growth we have been seeing, it is very difficult to keep up with everything never mind taking the time to actually analyze your own website surroundings and linking structure to see what websites are linking to you from a structural stand point. It is important to take the time to really understand the linking structure of your website so you know where to make improvements and where to ratchet things down. Let’s take a look at some of the important areas the Google webmaster will show you for your website: Here is a basic video (a few years old but still good!) about how to use Google Webmaster Tools: Links to Your Site: This is a great CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Analytics Should Be Your Best Friend
For a newcomer, stepping into the area of search engine marketing can be quite overwhelming especially if they haven’t really ventured into the online marketing space before. It is bad enough for those individuals to try and learn how to do many of the items themselves but to analyze the raw data and dissect it in order to understand how it is working for them could be a lengthy learning curve. There are many good analytics software packages out there, but I highly recommend Google analytics for most websites. It is easy to use, free and reliable. Let’s take a look at some of the most important areas to view in your Google analytics account: 1. Visitors: In this section of your CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Page Load Time Going To Be More Important?
Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going to be a large factor for website rankings. Matt Cutts from Google has said that as it will be important it will not be a major factor yet. Matt describes it in a little more detail in the video below: Google’s ultimate continuous goal with or without any search engine updates is to increase the speed and efficiency of the search engines which is always a very important aspect of anything CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Matt Cutt’s View on Changing Your Hosting
For all of those businesses large and small who might be worried their rankings will simply tank just from changing their hosting company can now sleep at night. Coming from Matt Cutt’s mouth he claims that changing your hosting company will not affect your SEO in any sort of way. This is assuming that you are moving to a quality hosting company and not to a server that is jammed up with other spammy websites. Changing a hosting provider can be a very scary moment for many businesses especially when your entire livelihood depends on your website. Any problems could put your sales for that day or week in a very tricky and dangerous situation. Here is the video from Matt Cutts about Changing Your CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Total Or Unique Visitors, What Is the Difference?
New webmasters might be confused about the difference between visitors and unique visitors in your analytics program. If you're not sure which metric is the more important of the two then perhaps you need to spend a little more time analyzing your traffic. Your Visitor count is the total number of visitors in the reporting period you are observing. Unique visitors is the number of visitors who have visited your site for the first time. Which is the more important metric for your site depends a lot on your site's mission and your goals, but for most website owners, both metrics tell a story. Total visitor count is an important metric because it tells you precisely how many people who have been on CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
The Ease Of Google Analytics
Some of the best things in life are free. Google Analytics is one of them...Google Analytics is one of the easiest tools to implement when it comes to ensuring that you are able to track your website statistics and have a working intelligence of your search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts. You just set up an account and add the code provided to you to the footer of your website pages. Then you are able to view your statistics at a glance. There are elements that are perfect for the novice and expert users alike. Here is a very helpful video about how to use Google Analytics: To sign up for a Google Analytics account, migrate over to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Analytics Adds New Features
If you use Google Analytics, which is perhaps the best free analytics tool online, then you should know that the Google team behind it has added new features. These features are designed to help power users make the most of the analytics tool and to make the tool more flexible. I think Google succeeds on this one. Here's a run down of the new features: Two new goal types and expansion of the number of goals allowed Expanded mobile reporting Advanced Table Filtering Unique Visitor Metric for custom reports Multiple custom variables Sharing and custom reports expansion features Analytics Intelligence Custom Alerts The video below contains the new Google Analytics features: While all of these features are great new features for someone, I think two of the most robust off these features are the last two CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Are Hackers Friendly People?
When it comes to getting hacked, you might think that the guys who did that to you are real bad people. Not necessarily. It could be your pharmacist or the good looking guy next door. You know, the one who took you to dinner last weekend at the five star restaurant? You didn't know he was a computer genius, did you? Well, he may not be. He could just have enough money to pay the real genius to hack your website and divert your traffic to his online vialis candy machine. Let's face it. You don't know who the people are that are hacking your website. They could be some terrorist cell in Albania, some family in Russia trying to keep food on the table, or the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
SEO Journal is Written by
Brick Marketing Founder,
Nick Stamoulis:
Nick Stamoulis - SEO Bio.
Tel. - 877-295-0620
nick@brickmarketing.com
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